In related art, there is known a poppet valve type fluid control valve that controls a flow rate of air supplied to various devices mounted on a vehicle (see, e.g., JP 2013-087803A (Reference 1)).
The fluid control valve of Reference 1 includes a shaft member (“valve shaft” in Reference 1) that moves along an axis by a driving force of a driving source, a holding member having a tubular portion into which the tip end of the shaft member is inserted with a radial predetermined gap and a valve body extending radially outward from the tubular portion (“valve frame” in Reference 1), and a housing (“valve housing” in Reference 1) having an annular valve seat on which the valve body abuts.
Further, a rotatable ball is disposed in a through hole provided on the tip end of the shaft member, and the ball is fixed by caulking the holding member such that the holding member is capable of swinging with respect to the shaft member. As a result, even in a case where the parallelism between the valve body and the valve seat is not constant due to a fluid pressure received by the valve body from a fluid or a dimensional error of components when the valve body is closed, the sealing member of the valve body is pressed against the valve seat over the entire circumference of the valve seat by applying a forward direction driving force to the shaft member.
However, in the fluid control valve of the related art, the sealing performance is high because the valve body swings with respect to the shaft member such that the sealing member of the valve body is pressed against the valve seat over the entire circumference. However, since the tip end of the shaft member is machined to form the through hole and dispose the ball therein, manufacturing costs increase. Further, since the ball or the space for accommodating the ball is provided, the axial length of the fluid control valve increases.
Thus, a need exists for a compact fluid control valve which is not susceptible to the drawback mentioned above.